Life with kids and dogs, learning new crafts, and parents who are adjusting to role reversal

The Saga Continues, or: Quarantine Blues

I did get that warp on the loom, finally, and made five placemats with it. They aren’t as perfect as I’d like, particularly as I forgot to count the picks, so was going by measuring only, but they’re not horrible. I also didn’t leave enough room between mats, which is another thing I’ll remember to do next time I have a large warp. So, I’m not going to put the photos up.

I’m now giving thought to what I want to do next. I want to get two warps going, one on my Flip, and one on the Mighty Wolf, and I also want to try out overshot weaving. So I’m doing some thinking about it. I’ve gotten the warp onto the Flip, but haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with the Mighty Wolf. In the meantime, I dragged out my book on crocheting socks. I’d wanted to try that out for a long time, so I decided to do it while in between weaving projects. I made two pairs, and was actually very happy with both of them. The second pair was yoga socks, so they have neither heel nor toe, and that actually made them a bit difficult to crochet, because one side of the heel begins with a long chain, and getting the chain to be loose enough is the problem. Mine are both a bit tight, though the second one is looser than the first. If I opt to make them again, I’ll need to make them looser still. But they were fun to make.

First pair of crocheted socks

I have silk spinning on Anansi. That’s what I’m doing as I try to figure out what to weave next. When I started this entry, coronavirus was not quite as prevalent as it is right now. Or maybe I should say, it wasn’t known in the US to be the threat we now know it to be. Now, all of the schools in North Carolina are closed for the next two weeks, and the children will be home, which means finding something to do is now a necessity!!!

I guess it’s a good thing I have so much yarn…I have a feeling I’m going to be using quite a bit of it!

Crocheted yoga socks

While the children are thrilled to be out of school, they’re also bored being confined to the house. Hubby has to work, which isn’t making things any easier. Because of my medical history, I’m immunocompromised, so I’m extremely reluctant to have company or be company nowadays. Social distancing is the new watchword. So Facebook sees a lot of me when I feel the need to be social now!

Besides spinning, I’ve been entertaining the kids by making slime, and of course there are the normal chores that need to be done every day. I was surprised at how much fun I had making slime. I’d never done it before, and the word “slime” does not exactly imply fun to me, but it was. We actually made two batches of normal slime, and one of fluffy. Two batches, we used a few drops of essential oils to scent them. My fluffy slime smells like cloves, which has good memories for me, but the kids don’t like the scent. C’est la vie!

When I began this post, I hadn’t finished spinning the silk, but it is now done and skeined. It isn’t my best effort, although, for not having used my wheel in three years, I think it’s pretty good. But the consistency is, in reality, pretty bad. In some places, it’s the thickness I wanted, but in most others it’s either too thick, or too thin, and when plying it, it broke a couple of times. All in all, while it could be worse, it could also be much better. In hindsight, I really shouldn’t have started with silk, although it’s one of my favorite fibers to spin. I have a tote absolutely full of different types of silk waiting to be spun. I also have a lot of much less expensive merino that I probably should have spun first. From a financial standpoint, it’s much more forgiving!

Spun, plied, and skeined silk

After skeining the silk on my niddy-noddy this evening, I went on a hunt through my totes to see what I could use for practice, and came across a bag that I’d forgotten about: a bunch of roving purchased from a well-known, foreign, online website. This bag was purchased roughly three years ago, and is full of tiny bags of roving. It is also the crappiest roving I’ve ever had the dubious pleasure of touching. Aneira is not a spinner, but she touched this stuff and one of the merino rovings I purchased from an LYS here, and she could feel the difference in quality. This stuff feels horrible in the hand. As in, you wouldn’t want anything you made from it close to your skin. But it is good for one thing: practice!!!